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As ExtremeTech and PC Magazine recently reported (Solutions, April 9), the widespread deployment of 802.11b wireless LANs has made corporate and personal data easy pickings for crackers. A brief sortie in a car or on foot, or even a quick jaunt up to a rooftop in a densely populated area, will reveal dozens of accessible wireless networks in most communitiessometimes several per block.

And tiny wireless cameras are another way of tracking people's movements. Although annoying pop-up ads for X10 wireless video cameras caused many Internet users to boycott the products, these items have nonetheless generated a great deal of business. Many people use the cameras to spy on neighbors, spouses, kids, babysitters, and others. These easily concealed cameras can't extract data from your PC, but they can look over your shoulder and send a rapid-fire stream of images over the air, giving a spy a pretty good idea of what you're doing.

What's more, the spy who planted the camera may not be the only one who's watching. Students driving around college campuses with X10 receivers and high-gain antennas have discovered numerous cameras capturing images of dorm rooms, showers, and locker rooms. Scans of the airwaves in business districts reveal views not only of the interiors of offices (a useful information source for a company's competitors) but of clothing store dressing rooms. Software designed to work with these cameras can capture the images and preserve them indefinitely.

Brett Glass has more than 20 years of experience designing, building,
writing about, and crash-testing computer hardware and software. (A born
"power user," he often stresses products beyond their limits simply by
trying to use them.) A consultant, author, and programmer based in
Laramie, Wyoming, Brett obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in
Electrical Engineering from the Case Institute of Technology and his MSEE
from Stanford. He plans networks, builds and configures servers, outlines
technical strategies, designs embedded systems, hacks UNIX, and writes
highly optimized assembly language.
During his rather eclectic career, Brett has...
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